Approved: Fedora 33 Desktop Variants Defaulting To Btrfs File-System

[Charlie68]

I wonder if Ubuntu will end up switching from ZFS to btrfs like they switched from Mir to Gnome...I hope fedora speeds up the missing btrfs cache and encription features.

It is very difficult to understand Ubuntu, it changes its mind every year. For example, did you know that Btrfs in Ubuntu should have been predefined by Ubuntu 10.10?

https://www.tuxjournal.net/p_12898/

On the net you will also find an enthusiastic Mark Shuttleworth claiming that Ubuntu will be the first distribution to use Btrfs, as he says this is a fantastic file system.

[RickXy]

More than the distribution, it is the applications that'll need intelligence for btrfs.

File managers, system tools etc all need support.

But I'm glad Fedora has chosen for btrfs. At least it's users can now do the unexpected testing which should ultimately help improve btrfs

As for redhat, it won't take them much time to reintroduce it as a tech preview if things go as planned

[S.Pam]

w00t. I re-installed my laptop with LUKS + BTRFS. Got snapper up and running with some minor modifications to the timeline. I added `chattr +C` to my Firefox and Thunderbird profile directories, as well as on some VM and container directories and so they don't suffer too much from the copy on write.

I would not suggest doing chattr +C. This reduces data integrity - i.e. if you have a crash or power outage you may loose data in your profile. Better would be perhaps to only do this on the sqlite db. For other things like cached files it serves no purpose to do +C because it is write once, read many times. Whereas the sqlite is frequently updated and that causes some fragmentation.

For Thunderbird, choose to store mails as individual files (Maildir option) rather than a single mbox file.

[starshipeleven]

Thank you. I was under the impression reading material online that you can store snapshots on a storage device. I would think it'd be popular to do this in order to guard against the risk of hard drive failure.

you can copy snapshots to another drive with send/receive commands. The other storage device can be formatted with btrfs for this to work directly, or if it is not formatted with btrfs you can put them into a file. You are just piping the send command into a compression tool (tar or lzip for example) that will generate a compressed file, and reversing that for the receive when you want to restore the snapshot. This is similar to ZFS functionality.

This can be done manually, or using a software that does it automatically, see this page on btrfs wiki for details https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index....emental_Backup

[starshipeleven]

w00t. I re-installed my laptop with LUKS + BTRFS. Got snapper up and running with some minor modifications to the timeline. I added `chattr +C` to my Firefox and Thunderbird profile directories, as well as on some VM and container directories and so they don't suffer too much from the copy on write.

you can also add "autodefrag" to the fstab's filesystem options coloumn to deal with that. Going nocow is necessary only for very heavy fragmentation, like databases doing real production jobs in a server, and VMs.

also installing the btrfsmaintenance application (with its cron jobs) is a good idea, it's installed by default in OpenSUSE

[aorth]

It's fine.

w00t. I re-installed my laptop with LUKS + BTRFS. Got snapper up and running with some minor modifications to the timeline. I added `chattr +C` to my Firefox and Thunderbird profile directories, as well as on some VM and container directories and so they don't suffer too much from the copy on write.

[herman]

Yes it is good for both SSD and HDD. With its native compression (zstd, LZO, zlib) you can save bytes written on your SSD. Also, snapshots can be stored on any medium, including in a tar file.

btrfs send /mnt/snapshots/home.20200718 | cfz /media/backup-drive/home.20200718.tgz -T -

You can also send your snapshot over ssh to another computer or remote location for backup. This also works with incremental snapshots! (You do have to save each incremental archive between each full snapshot on the target location)

Thank you for this. I was hoping I could keep the spindle on ext4 and now it looks like I can. This sounds like btrfs snapshots will be very useful for regular users.

[herman]

Good for spindle disks, not too bad on SSDs.

Didn't know snapshots can be stored off disk.

Thank you. I was under the impression reading material online that you can store snapshots on a storage device. I would think it'd be popular to do this in order to guard against the risk of hard drive failure.

[S.Pam]

- Is it good or bad for SSDs?
- Is it good or bad for spindle disks?
- If I want to store btrfs snapshots on a spindle disk for backup, must the spindle disk be formatted to btrfs?

Yes it is good for both SSD and HDD. With its native compression (zstd, LZO, zlib) you can save bytes written on your SSD. Also, snapshots can be stored on any medium, including in a tar file.

btrfs send /mnt/snapshots/home.20200718 | tar cfz /media/backup-drive/home.20200718.tgz -T -

You can also send your snapshot over ssh to another computer or remote location for backup. This also works with incremental snapshots! (You do have to save each incremental archive between each full snapshot on the target location)

[Mangix]

I’m surprised that a file system can be so controversial. I’m new to Linux and have Fedora 32 installed on a spindle disk. The plan is to later upgrade to an SSD and do a fresh reinstall, but I still can’t wrap my head around this new btrfs filesystem.

- Is it good or bad for SSDs?
- Is it good or bad for spindle disks?
- If I want to store btrfs snapshots on a spindle disk for backup, must the spindle disk be formatted to btrfs?

I’ve heard everything from btrfs is the future to it’s the worst thing that will ruin your data. It's hard to get concrete information on this. Thanks!

Good for spindle disks, not too bad on SSDs.

Didn't know snapshots can be stored off disk.